


The Hunter and The Seeker

by Lovipovve



Category: The Dark Crystal (1982), The Dark Crystal: Age of Resistance (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Autistic Brea, Brea the miniature princess Mononoke version, Canon-Typical Violence, Found Family, Multi, Other, because i am autistic and i said she is, dadMal AU, dadVa AU as well, divorced lesbian aunts skekSa and urSan
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-22
Updated: 2019-12-30
Packaged: 2021-02-26 07:29:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 5,622
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21899710
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lovipovve/pseuds/Lovipovve
Summary: skekMal has to use unconventional methods for a particularly complicated hunt, which involves taking in a gelfling child.
Relationships: Brea & skekMal (Dark Crystal), skekMal/urVa (Dark Crystal), skekSa & skekMal, skekSa/urSan (Dark Crystal)
Comments: 10
Kudos: 30





	1. Things Lost On Family Trips

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> skekMal has to use unconventional methods for a particularly complicated hunt, involving taking in a gelfling child.

It’s a sweet scent hanging in the cold night air that draws skekMal away from the edges of the Dark Wood, a scent he recognizes very well. Gelfling blood, and a lot of it. He puts on his mask and lets the scent lead him through the forest. It has been a while since he’s eaten gelfling meat.

Now, skekMal is no carrion eater. Eating something another creature has killed would profane the ways of the hunt. But a creature that has killed a lot of gelflings, even if killing a lot of gelflings was no difficult feat for skekMal himself, could be a worthy hunt. He detects no other scents mingled with the gelflings, so if it is a single gelfling that has killed its comrades, skekMal could add another trophy to his collection and gain its strength. The thought that perhaps the gelflings were warring with each other does occur to him, and does not entertain it for long. Gelflings engage in petty squabbles as much, if not more, as his fellow skeksis do in their cramped castle, but unlike his brethren, gelflings scarcely drew each others’ blood.

(Of course, when his brethren do draw each others’ blood, it could be called “angry flailing of ones’ talons” or “ritualistic torture” rather than an actual fight.)

Leaping from tree branch to tree branch until the trees become too scarce and he has to continue on the ground, skekMal arrives at a roadside. The scene of the slaughter.

A gelfling carriage lies on its side, formerly ornate and elegant, now an unusable wreck nearly reduced to splinters. The gelflings who had traveled with it are littered about the roadside, looking like broken toys someone got tired of playing with. They’re dressed in blue armor as unnecessarily ornate as their carriage, spattered with their pink blood, and two of them don’t even have their weapons drawn. None of their blades appear to have managed to pierce the hide of whatever creature had attacked them. Inspecting the gelfling bodies, skekMal notes that he was wrong to call it a slaughter – all of the gelflings have clawmarks, but no bite marks and no chunks torn out of them for eating. Whatever had done this hadn’t killed them for food. The natural conclusion to draw from this would be that it had killed them to defend its territory, but if this is its territory, skekMal should have smelled its markers.

Why, then, can he discern no alien scent at all, not even where it had attacked?

A scuffle like this should leave something for him to sniff out, but there is nothing except the tracks of a landstrider running away from the scene. Just the large clawmarks, the wrecked carriage, and six gelfling bodies. Briefly, he considers it being a gelfling that had done it, but he quickly dismisses it. No matter how skilled it was with a blade, a gelfling can’t make fake clawmarks that big and convincing. It agitates and intrigues him at the same time. The hunt calls for him, to find this creature and take a new trophy, but there is nothing that can lead him to it. He lets out a low growl of frustration, tracing a jagged scar left on the carriage with his talons.

Then there’s another sound that breaks the silence. A muffled yelp from underneath one of the gelfling bodies. skekMal whips his head towards the sound and creeps closer to the body. It isn’t armored, he realizes, unlike the others, and the creature’s claws easily tore through the gelfling’s back, unhindered by the thin cloth. The gelfling is not alive, but the bundle underneath it is. Lifting the dead gelfling up, skekMal sees a smaller gelfling in its arms. It must have been dead for quite a while, because its arms are rigid and stiff around the tiny gelfling, and he has to pry its cold fingers off of the tiny gelfling to get a better look. The tiny gelfling is red-faced from tears, its long blond hair matted with pink blood that is not its own, its ridiculously unpractical dress is dirty and tattered, and its large yellow eyes stare up at skekMal. A childling. Its age and gender are a mystery to skekMal, not that he cares about it in the first place. All he cares about is what this thing knows about his new quarry. He picks it up by its scruff, eliciting a surprised squeal from it, and holds it up to eye level with him. “What did this and where is it now?” skekMal demands. “Talk.”

Banking on this childling knowing how to even talk to begin with turns out to work out just fine. The gelfling hiccups, wipes its tears, and says: “I don’t know what it was, but it was colorful, had wings, and it smelled horrible… It went…” It pauses, big eyes searching the tree tops, and then points northwest. “… that way.”

skekMal snorts and is about to put the gelfling back down when he fully processes what it said. “You know its scent?”

It nods. “Mmm.”

“How?” skekMal growls. “I can’t smell anything different here!”

It curls up in his grasp and frowns at him. “… I’m sorry? Maybe you have a cold?” Lifting its head to the sky, it sniffs the air. “I can’t smell it here anymore either, though, so I guess your nose is fine.”

“Don’t compare yourself to me”, skekMal says and curls his lip in disgust. He glares at the gelfling, then stomps over to the carriage and shoves it towards one of the clawmarks on it. It feels a bit silly, but he needs to try it. That he wants to make sure this gelfling doesn’t somehow have a better sense of smell than him is only _part_ of the reason. “Can you feel its scent here?”

Instead of obeying his order, the gelfling turns its head over its shoulder to stare at him with a distinct look that plainly says “is this a joke?” and/or “are you kidding me?”. When he stares back and a growl rises in his throat, it widens its eyes slightly, expression otherwise unchanged, and turns its head forward to stick its nose to the clawmark. If skekMal didn’t know any better, he would think it had rolled its eyes before turning away from him completely. “… No, I can’t”, the gelfling says and turns its head back to him after taking a couple of very loud sniffs at the ruined carriage. Its gaze flits between skekMal and the dead gelflings, uncertainty and tears threatening to well up in its eyes once again. Lowering the gelfling, skekMal is satisfied and vexed at the same time. While his pride remains unharmed, a gelfling’s sense of smell should be good enough to recognize a scent that recent, especially if it was “horrible” as the gelfling had described it. With no scent, a vague description, and no tracks, the trail had gone nearly as cold as the bodies of the dead gelflings.

The gelflings…

A realization dawns upon skekMal, and he is not happy about it. He recognizes the tactic the unknown creature uses – he masks his own scent to smell like gelfling, after all, which leaves all of his targets’ senses in the dark of his arrival. Not to mention that it brings arduffs slavering at the mouths to him, thinking that what they are hunting a puny gelfling when they are the ones being hunted. Knowing his quarry’s scent is his main way of locating it, and while the creature could hide its scent, it had not hidden it from this gelfling, even if only for a moment. All senses are needed when hunting, but scent is the most reliable of them all. Without this gelfling, he could search Thra for many a trine and never find the unknown creature, perhaps it will even die from age by the time he manages to seek it out, and it is clearly adept at hiding itself. Not to mention, the creature did seem to like killing gelflings, so this little gelfling could be used as bait.

skekMal the Hunter never lets a hunt slip out of his grasp. Even if it means using a gelfling.

He lifts the gelfling back up to eye-level with him. “You’re coming with me.”

“Can I?” the gelfling asks with those big, watery bug-eyes staring at him.

The expression on its face catches him off-guard for a moment. Out of all possible reactions, he hadn’t expected relief and hopefulness to be one of them. He also did not prepare for the question “can I”. He had planned to say “I don’t care” or maybe “else I leave you here to starve, your choice”, but neither make any sense as responses to the little gelfling’s words. So, as usual when he doesn’t know what to say, he settles for a growl and turns to leave, slinking back into the shadows of the forest to head northwest.

“Thank you”, the gelfling sniffles, dangling from his talon. “I didn’t know what to do or where to go…”

“This is not for you”, skekMal scoffs, after briefly considering whether he should even dignify that with a response and leave it to believe whatever it wishes to believe. But he is not the Chamberlain, indeed, he is not like any of his brethren, playing nice with the gelflings. If he has to drag it along, he’d rather not it be under any misunderstandings. “This is for the hunt. You are a tool, same as my weapons. You will help me find this creature, and once I have taken my trophy, that is when you’ll have to find your own way home.”

The gelfling, however, seems to not pay too much attention to his words. “Okay”, it simply replies with a yawn. Its yawn is not a sign of disrespect, but a display of its exhaustion, and it slowly swings itself backwards and forwards in skekMal’s grasp.

skekMal gives it an irritated side-eye, and he is hit with several realizations at once. Gelflings are already weak, small, and can’t survive on their own very well. Gelfling brats suffer from these problems even more than the adults. That leaves it up to him to make sure it doesn’t die before the hunt is over. This particular gelfling is wearing a dress that reminds him vaguely of the Ornamentalist in its gaudiness, and dresses are horribly and wholly unpractical for the wilds. It’s going to snag on everything in the forests and won’t keep it warm during nights. To top it all off, its legs are short and stubby and can’t possibly keep up with skekMal. He’s really going to have to carry this thing around wherever they went, until they found their target. Another growl rumbles in his throat. While this certainly is not the first time a hunt proved to be a bit of a hassle, it did seem to prove to be the most troublesome already.

 _It’s for the hunt_ , he thinks, as the little gelfling somehow seems to have managed to drift off to sleep, still dangling from his talon and blissfully unaware of the trouble it is causing him. _All that matters is the hunt._

*

Never before in her six trine has Brea struggled so much to keep her eyes open. Exhaustion washes over her in waves, as if her body is trying to drown her in sleep, lull her into the same cold slumber everyone else fell to after that horrible creature attacked. She won’t let it, not just yet. It’s not much different from trying to convince her mother to let her stay up past her bedtime, really, just that it’s her own body she’s arguing with this time. Thinking of her mother fogs her vision with tears and she stubbornly and rapidly blinks them away. While face down in the dirt, Brea didn’t see her mother get cut down like the rest, but she had heard her scream, and when she was lifted up from where she was trapped, Brea had only dared to give the bodies a quick glance, which wasn’t enough to see if her family was among them. Maybe her mother had escaped with Seladon and Tavra, or maybe they were all asleep like the rest.

"Asleep". She wishes she still remained ignorant of death, but she knows that the food the servants brought to her plate were dead animals. It had distressed her greatly for a time, until she accepted it and got over it. Or rather, she just stopped thinking of them as dead animals, and just as “food”. To try and think of gelflings, of her family, as “dead” is difficult. Calling death by its true name feels like giving it power, a definite end, so she forces herself to call it sleep. It is softer, less harsh, less cold...

_Hugged tightly by rigid arms, warmth draining steadily from the body shielding her, one by one the screams are silenced…_

Brea shakes her head quickly. It’s too much to think about, all of it far too heavy and too big and she’s too small and too frail. Now that she’s getting further and further away from that place, she casts the thoughts aside and leaves them behind. All that matters now is herself, and the one who rescued her.

Oh, right. How could she forget her manners just like that?

“I’m Brea”, she says, craning her neck to look up at him with bleary eyes. “What’s your name?”

He doesn’t stop his stride but he spares her a glance. “The Hunter.”

“That’s a weird name”, Brea mumbles with a yawn. The Hunter only growls in response.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I have a soft spot for the "big monster that protects small children" trope so now skekMal has to suffer for it. So yes, my first fic is purely self-indulgent, as it should be.  
> Also, quick note: Gelflings have tails. That's all.


	2. The First Steps

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The key to a hunt is preparation, and as the Hunter, skekMal is always prepared. Now he just needs to prepare the gelfling brat as well. Arduously.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Warning for animal death in this one, and while it isn't described in too much detail, it does involve butchering a six-legged deer-like animal.

“Brea, stop chewing on your hair.”

“I’m not”, Brea says, hurriedly spitting out her hair.

“Liar”, Seladon snorts. “You got drool all over your braid!”

“Don’t yell, Seladon”, says mother and pulls Brea into her lap. Brea can’t help but coo in delight. Only a certain few people are allowed to hug her, and her mother is number one on that list. There is no place she feels more safe than in her mother’s arms.

“I wasn’t yelling”, Seladon mutters to Tavra.

Unfortunately for her, not only does Brea hear it, but their mother does, too. Mother closes her eyes exasperatedly. “Seladon, what have we said about talking back?”

Something must be very interesting on the floor of the carriage, because Seladon stares at it intently. “Not to.” Quietly, she adds, “ _We_ didn’t say that, _you_ did”. Luckily for Seladon, only Brea and Tavra hear it this time, and Brea is busy trying to see what’s so interesting about the floor and Tavra just elbows Seladon gently for her reckless comment.

Mother seems content with that and idly braids Brea’s hair as she looks to the Spriton gelfling sitting across from her, ambassador Hanun. “Back to what I was saying... That went well, I think.”

Hanun laughs heartily and leans back in his seat. “If you say so, All-Maudra. Although I guess we did avoid the Spriton turning their warpath towards us.”

“All thanks to you, ambassador”, mother says sincerely and glances out the window of the carriage.

Brea follows her mother’s gaze, going so far as to stick her head out the window. Ahead of them lies the Dark Wood, the Endless Forest. Why they hadn’t just settled on one name baffled Brea, especially since they should obviously settle on the former of the two. At least “the Dark Wood” is an accurate descriptor since the “endless” forest did actually have an end. Many of them, in fact.

“Why do they want that forest so badly, anyways?” Seladon asks Hanun, rousing Brea from her internal rant.

“Seladon, don’t be rude”, mother says sharply.

“It’s fine, All-Maudra”, says Hanun with a smile. “She’s just curious.” He turns to Seladon and clears his throat. “Have you ever heard the saying, ‘a Spriton knows soil as well as the Dousan know death’? Well, us Spriton are farmers primarily, and we know that the soil in the Endless Forest is really good for farming, so the Maudra Ari wants it to be her territory instead. She doesn’t want to make a fair trade with the Stonewood Clan, though, and Stonewood would have no territory left if they gave up the Endless Forest. So of course they decide to make threats of war and shake their fists at each other from a whole forest away.”

Tavra and Brea giggle at the mental image while Seladon puts on her stoic, mature face.

“Things have been escalating lately”, Hanun continues. He looks out the other window, gazing wistfully at the Spriton Plains they’re leaving behind. “Some from Stone-in-the-wood found Spriton hunters in the Endless Forest and got into a… let’s say ‘kerfuffle’. No one got too hurt, but the two Clans like each other even less now. Our dear All-Maudra, your mother, has refused to take a side in the argument and instead works to have the Clans make peace with each other. The Spritons don’t like that one bit.”

“That’s why Maudra Ari refused to come to Brea’s debut party”, Seladon says with her face lit up like she just figured out a puzzle.

Hanun nods emphatically. “Yes, exactly. Very clever, Seladon. It was to make a statement, and then act scandalized about not being allowed to see the new princess, making claims about how the All-Maudra doesn’t respect the Spriton Clan. She even-”

“Ambassador, that’s quite enough on that”, mother interrupts and hugs Brea tighter. “They’re still young. These… politics might be a bit too much for them.”

“Right”, Hanun says, straightening his back. “Of course, All-Maudra. The point I was getting to was that this was why we went there today for a second, private debut party for Brea. Just for the Spritons.”

Frowning slightly, Seladon taps her chin in thought. “Aren’t you worried the other Clans will think we’re playing favorites?”

The mirthless laugh and tired look Hanun gives her is answer enough. “Yes, well…”

Before he can continue, the carriage comes to a stop. Mother and Hanun both stiffen. The two exchange a look and mother gently sets Brea down on the carriage seat, leaning her head out the window. Of course, this only makes Brea curious, so she scoots over to the other window and looks out. At that moment, a pale, bald gelfling dressed in tattered clothes passes by her window, a few inches away from her face, and makes its way to the front of the carriage. Brea waves at them, because that’s what you’re supposed to do when you see someone, but they don’t notice. A paladin follows the gelfling after it passes and Brea notices how different the paladin’s and the bald gelfling’s footprints look – the tattered gelfling’s footprints are a lot deeper than the paladin’s. Weird.

Hands wrap around her arm and she’s pulled back from the window. She whines at the touch and looks up accusingly at Hanun, who, to his credit, at least looks apologetic about it. “Sorry, childling. Better stay away from the windows for now, okay?”

Another paladin is speaking with mother in urgent whispers, and mother nods and steps outside. “I’ll just be a moment. There’s a hurt gelfling out there that may need our help.”

The ones left in the carriage sit completely still, save for Brea who tries to wrench her arm free from Hanun’s grasp. They listen to the voices outside, that sound confused and concerned as the bald gelfling seems not to respond to their questions at all.

At last, the bald gelfling speaks, with a cracked and distorted voice that doesn’t sound like a gelfling at all, and Brea strains her ears to try and hear what it says but can't make out any words at all. She does catch scent of something, a horrible, awful smell in the air...

Then the beast appears without a sound, and Brea wakes up.

*

One sun and a half have risen by the time skekMal hears the little gelfling stir awake. It is quiet for a long moment, then it reaches its small hands up to clasp the secondary talon holding it and announces: “I’m hungry.” It pauses to swing its little body from side to side, then adds, “And I think my legs are asleep. Maybe my tail too. And my arms. And I think I can feel a heartbeat in my eyes-”

“Endure it”, skekMal growls. “You’ll get food soon enough. The gruzzers shouldn’t be far away.”

He can hear it puff up, pout, and finally relent. “Okay, but-”

“Endure it in silence”, he says, cutting it off. It lets out a loud and irritated huff in response, but doesn’t test his patience more than that. Paying the gelfling’s quiet fuming no mind, he leans down to inspect the gruzzer tracks, grabbing a handful of the dirt and sniffing it. Just as he thought, the hoof print is fresh and the air is heavy with the pungent smell of a gruzzer herd. They’re close, and there’s a lot of them. He’s going to have to be patient and cautious, flighty animals that they are, and he is painfully reminded of the noisy bundle hanging from his secondary talon. It’s not exactly the ideal way to hunt.

Scanning his surroundings, he contemplates what to do with the gelfling while he gets it food. Briefly, he considers handing it a dagger and leaving it to fend for itself in the meantime, but he doesn’t want its grubby little hands on his weapons and he doubts it could even wrap its fingers around the handle, anyways. No, he determines, it would be better to hide the gelfling, and so he leaps into a tree, climbing up until they’re about eighteen feet off the ground. Once there, he plops the gelfling down on a sturdy branch. “This should be good.”

Instead of standing still, the gelfling stomps on the branch and shakes its legs. It frowns and looks down at its legs crossly, which turns into dawning horror as it catches a glimpse of how high up it is. Letting out a muffled yelp, it lunges forward and clings to skekMal’s arm. “I don’t know… Are you sure I can’t stay with you? I don’t want to fall down.”

Strange. A gelfling grabbing skekMal’s arm is a familiar scene, in a sense. How many times have they done this to beg for mercy? He wasn’t keeping track, and if he was, he’d lost count by now. Yet, in his thousand trine of life, there were still firsts to be had, and this is certainly the first time a gelfling has latched onto him for safety. He’s not sure if he should laugh or shove the gelfling away. Shoving it would end with it falling off the branch possibly to an untimely death, though, and he doesn’t feel like laughing. So he snorts and pries its hands off of his arm, then reaches into his cloak and takes out the cage he carries with him.

“Where were you keeping that?” the gelfling asks, tilting its head to the side.

He ignores its question and sticks the gelfling inside the cage, despite its protests. He then closes the hatch and wraps the chain around the branch, leaving the cage hanging from the tree. The gelfling looks on in stunned silence. “There”, skekMal says as he secures the chain, “now you won’t fall down. Stay here.”

Its reply is a deadpan stare from behind the bars.

“Good.” And with that, he covers the cage, leaps down from the tree and advances on the herd of gruzzers.

*

A successful hunt later, when the three brothers were high in the sky, skekMal returns to the cage with a gruzzer slung over his shoulder. “Gelfling! Do you still live?”

“I have a name!” the gelfling retorts from inside its cage. “I even gave it to you! You could use it!” It peers down at him. “Are you going to let me out now?”

“No.”

“ _No?!_ ”

“Endure it”, skekMal says. As he hears it begin to speak again, he adds sharply, “In silence.”

“Fine!” it says very loudly and harrumphs, but does go quiet.

Satisfied with the silence, skekMal drops the gruzzer, its six spindly legs splayed out on the ground, its white belly exposed, and its head propped up by its own horns. Before he begins to skin it, he removes one of its cloven hooves, as a gruzzer’s strength lies in its speed, and places it in his leg pouch. A small trophy to aid him on this hunt and to be discarded once this hunt is over. Then, without further ceremony, he sinks his dagger into its hide and gets to work. Normally, this is a rare moment of calm for skekMal. Methodically cutting into a creature, taking what he is owed, and the familiarity of it all is almost enough to make him feel content.

Normally, that is. Unfortunately, there is currently an unfamiliar component to his work, hanging from a tree.

As skekMal removes the gruzzer’s hide and any flesh clinging to it, there’s a _tap, tap,_ _thud!,_ and jingling of a chain above him. Irritated, he raises his head to look up at the cage. It is swinging from side to side, propelled by the gelfling inside. The source of the “tapping” noise turns out to be the gelfling running back and forth in the cage, smacking into the opposing walls each time with a “thud”. Apparently, its legs are no longer asleep. It does this repeatedly with a brief pause after each thud, and the cage’s swings get a little too close to looping around the tree for skekMal’s comfort. Growling, he throws the gruzzer’s hide to hang on a lower tree branch and calls out to the gelfling: “What are you doing?!”

The swinging of the cage thankfully slows, but it does not stop. “I was enduring in silence”, the gelfling says simply, sounding a little out of breath from running about. “So I used the cage as a swing! It was a lot more fun than sitting around and waiting.”

Ah. Clearly, suspecting an escape attempt was overestimating the gelfling’s intelligence and capacity for common sense. “You think _that_ was silent?”

“I wasn’t saying anything”, says the gelfling and stubbornly crosses its arms.

“Stop it”, skekMal growls. If this is how gelfling children act, how do the adults not throw them away? How the gelflings have not only not gone extinct by now and prospered enough that there are so many of them, skekMal could never figure out, and this ordeal only serves to further his perplexity. Shaking his head, he returns to his work on the gruzzer and begins to cut into the gruzzer’s skinless body. He is reminded of how tough its flesh is and glances to the gelfling skulls hanging from his belt. The skulls’ teeth are small and blunt, only good for chewing and nothing else. No doubt the gelfling child’s teeth are even more useless. While he pulls out the gruzzer’s heart, he ponders on what he knows of animals’ habits with their young to try and figure out how he’s supposed to feed this thing.

It takes him longer than he’d like to admit to even consider that he could just cut the meat up into smaller pieces that the gelfling could easily just swallow whole.

A few hours later, the gruzzer lies butchered at his feet and at last, all there’s left to do is to eat it. Its remains are thrown into the undergrowth for the scavengers to feast on and skekMal climbs the tree to get the gelfling. Inside its cage, the gelfling is curled up asleep again (how much do these things sleep, anyways?), hugging its own tail. skekMal pounds with his talon on the cage and the gelfling wakes with a start, jumping to its feet only to immediately trip and fall over as the cage rocks back and forth.

“It’s done”, skekMal announces, unwrapping the chain from the tree branch. “I’m taking you down from here.”

“Oh, _finally”,_ the gelfling groans. “It’s so boring in here! When I can’t swing it, anyways. Thanks for that.”

skekMal stares at it dead in the eye and lets the chain slip through his talons, causing the cage to begin to fall and the gelfling to let out a high-pitched yelp. Before the chain slips entirely from his clutches, he fastens his grip and the cage’s descent comes to an abrupt stop. “Next time I won’t-”

“That was fun!” the gelfling interrupts. “Do it again!”

Well. Looks like his usual intimidation tactics don’t work. It’s both infuriating and admirable, in a way, although he suspects the gelfling is simply oblivious to his death threats. With a grunt, he makes his way back to the ground and lets the gelfling out. He allows it a moment to stretch its legs before he scoops it up and places it in front of the pile of tiny bits of meat he prepared for it. “Eat.”

The gelfling looks down at the meat, then at him. “Eat?”

“Are you a mimic?” he growls and picks up the gruzzer’s heart, taking a demonstrative bite out of it. “ _Eat._ ”

“No, it’s just that…” the gelfling says, trailing off as it watches skekMal tear into his own meal, witnessing skeksis dinner etiquette for the first time in its life and clearly not enjoying a moment of it. “… food usually doesn’t look like this.”

Despite its misgivings, it pops a bit of meat into its mouth and promptly spits it out the next second. It retches and frantically tries to get the taste off its tongue, pausing only when it notices skekMal staring at it. Glancing between skekMal and the meat, it looks… ashamed? skekMal is not terribly familiar with the emotion himself (it is too similar to guilt, and that feeling is something he denies was ever a part of him). In this shame, assuming his guess is correct, the gelfling slowly picks up another piece and swallows it whole. After several seconds of standing completely still and grimacing, the gelfling forces a grin. “T- Thank you for the food! That was really good!”

“Just eat”, skekMal says gruffly and takes another vicious bite out of the gruzzer heart. “You’ll need it.”

Its face falls as if all hope and innocence has been drained from it, staring at the pile of meat with dread. “Oh… more… great. Love that.”

skekMal finishes his own meal, the noise of which certainly doesn’t help the gelfling’s appetite, and grabs the gruzzer’s pelt, beginning to carve it. Before they set out again, there is one last thing he figures the gelfling needs, and that thing is something to keep it warm. Can’t have it dying of hypothermia before they even find this hidden beast. He’s not the Ornamentalist, but he has made many things on his own, such as pouches and his carefully crafted bone armor. If the hushed whispers of skekAyuk and skekOk are to be believed, then what he has crafted have not been “pretty”, in fact, their choice words were “disgusting” and “ugly”. Beauty and such things have no importance to skekMal, it only matters if something is useful or not, and a cloak made from the thick pelt of a gruzzer should be enough for the gelfling’s continued survival.

He cuts out a crude patch of the pelt and holds it up in front of him. It has the _appearance_ of a miniature cloak, at least. With a bit of arduff sinew to tie around the collar, he considers it done and looks to the gelfling, then double-takes as he sees the gelfling lying face-down on the ground. _‘_ _Don’t tell me it choked on the meat and died!’_

Thankfully, it lets out a groan and rolls onto its back. Not dead, just bemoaning its fate of having to eat raw meat. To its credit, it has reduced the pile to about half of its original size. Still, skekMal stifles a groan of his own and grabs it by the scruff. “Quit your whining.” Without waiting for its reply, he uses his free talons to put the cloak on the gelfling.

The gelfling’s pained grimace vanishes in an instant as it curiously looks at the cloak, wrapping the cloak around itself and patting the fur with its tiny hands. It looks up at skekMal with a big smile on its face. “It’s so soft!”

He’s not sure how to respond to that. He puts the rest of the meat into a pouch and picks up the gelfling again. “We’ve wasted enough time. It’s time we set out again.”

“Do you have to carry me like this?” the gelfling asks, crossing its arms.

“Would you rather I put you back in the cage and dragged you along?” skekMal growls.

“That would be really inconvenient”, the gelfling says. “Can’t you just…” It pauses, thinking hard, then its face lights up. “Oh! You could carry me piggyback!”

“Piggy… back?” skekMal repeats slowly, then leans close to the gelfling and snarls, “What did you call me?!”

The gelfling _still_ doesn’t look a bit intimidated and just looks baffled. “You know, piggyback ride? When you carry someone on your shoulders?”

… Stupid gelfling language, with their strange, nonsensical words. It has a point, though – he would prefer to have his talons free. He growls and practically throws the gelfling onto his back. “Don’t fall off.”

Letting out a delighted squeal, the gelfling grips on tight to his bone armor. “Okay!”

“Don’t touch the bones, either.”

“Oh, sorry…”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Did anyone else wonder where skekMal got that cage he dragged along with him when he caught Brea? Anywho...  
> Original character and creature time, featuring Hanun the Spriton ambassador and gruzzers the prey animals! And some headcanon gelfling politics time. Really, with how much the clans seem to hate each other - I mean, those Stonewood gelflings really just started pushing Deet around over nothing in like 2 seconds - you'd think the All-Maudra would need some ambassadors to help smooth things over in times of conflict. Also, for the gelfling debut parties, I imagine they would wait until the princess is at least six trine old because a baby would just be stressed out by it, and this way the princess gets to see what the other clans are like for the first time.  
> Anyways, now that skekMal has some basics of parenting down and there's been some exposition of what happened before the attack on the carriage, next chapter should kick things off.


End file.
